Thursday, November 30, 2017

In his article,1 Richard calls upon his readers to "change the conversation". He asks, "What are your thoughts?" He says, if we don't "come up with a viable alternative, our goose is cooked." I fully agree. So I join the conversation, in order to improve it.

Let me first say I appreciate Richard's article very much. It is very useful, indeed necessary, to also present one's cause in a short article – for those who are interested but, for whatever reason, cannot read a whole book. Richard has ably presented the eco-socialist case against both capitalism and "green" capitalism.

But the alternative Richard has come up with is deficient in one very important respect, namely in respect of viability. Allow me to present here my comradely criticisms. It will be short.

Is only Capitalism the Problem?

(1) Richard writes, "Capitalism, not population is the main driverof planetary ecological collapse … .". It sounds like an echo of statements from old-Marxist-socialism. It is not serious. Is Richard telling us that, while we are fighting a long-drawn-out battle against capitalism in order to overcome it, we can allow the population to continuously grow without risking any further destruction of the environment? Should we then think that a world population of ten billion by 2050 would not be any problem?

I would agree if Richard would say that capitalism is, because of its growth compulsion, one of the maindrivers of ecological collapse. But anybody who has learned even a little about ecology knows that in any particular eco-region, an exponential growth of any one species leads to the collapse of its ecological balance. If we now think of the planet Earth as one whole eco-region and consider all the scientific reports on rapid bio-diversity loss and rapid dwindling of the numbers of larger animals, then we cannot but correlate these facts with the exponential growth of our own species, homo sapiens sapiens, the latter being the cause of the former two.

No doubt, capitalism-together with the development of technologies, especially agricultural and medical technologies – has largely enabled the huge growth of human numbers in the last two hundred years. But human population growth has been occurring even in pre-capitalist and pre-medieval eras, albeit at a slower rate. Parallel to this, also environmental destruction has been occurring and growing in these eras.

It is not good to tell our readers only half the truth. The whole truthis succinctly stated in the equation:

I = PxTxA

where Istands for ecological impact (we can also call it ecological destruction),Pfor population, T for Technology and A for affluence. All these three factors are highly variable. Let me here also quote Paul Ehrlich, one of my teachers in political ecology. Addressing leftists, he once wrote, "Whatever [be] your cause, it is a lost cause unless we control population [growth]". Note the phrase "whatever your cause". Ehrlich meant to say, and I too think so, the cause may be environmental protection, saving the earth, protecting biodiversity, overcoming poverty and unemployment, women's liberation, preventing racist and ethnic conflicts and cleansings, preventing huge unwelcome migration flows, preventing crime, fighting modern-day slavery, bringing peace in the world, creating a socialist world order etc. etc. etc., in all cases stopping population growth is a very important factor. Sure, that will in no case be enough. But that is an essential part of the solutions.

Note that in the equation cited above, there is no mention of capitalism. Instead, we find there the two factors technology and affluence. We can call (and we generally do call) the product of T x A (production of affluence by means of industrial technologies) industrialism, of which there has until now been two main varieties: the capitalist one and the planned socialist one (of the Soviet type). Nothing will be gained for saving the ecological balance of the Earth if only capitalism is replaced with socialism, and ruling socialists then try to increase production at a higher rate, which they must do under the pressure of a growing population which, moreover, develops higher ambitions and aspirations, and demands all the good things that middle-class Americans enjoy.

(2) Modern-day old-socialists do not deny the existence of an ecological problem. They have also developed several pseudo-solutions such as "clean" and "renewable" energies and materials, efficiency revolution, decoupling of GDP growth from resource use etc.

Good that Richard rejects the idea that green capitalismcan save us. But why can't it? "Because", he writes, "companies can’t commit economic suicide to save the humans. There’s just no solution to our crisis within the framework of any conceivable capitalism." This is good, but not enough. Because there are old-socialists (I know many in Germany) who believe that it is only individual capitalists/companies and the system capitalism that are preventing a rapid transition to 100 percent clean renewable energies and 100 percent recycling of all materials. Thanks to these possibilities, they believe, old-socialist type of industrialism, and even economic and population growth can be reconciled with the requirements of sustainability. I don't think that is possible, and I have also earlier elaborately explained why.2 Said briefly, "renewable energies" are neither clean nor renewable, and 100 percent recycling is impossible because the Entropy Law also applies to matter. What Richard thinks is not clear from this article of his. It is necessary to make his thoughts on this point clear.

Is Bottom-up Democracy of Any Use in the Transition Period?

(3) Richard writes, "Rational planning requires bottom-up democracy." I do not understand the connection between the two, planning and democracy. At the most, one could say that for better planning for the villages, the planning commission should also listen to the villagers. But at the national level? Should, e.g., the inhabitants of each and every 500 souls village in the Ganges basin codetermine in a bottom-up democratic planning process how the waters of the said river and its tributaries should be distributed among ca. 500 million inhabitants of the basin? If that were ever to be attempted, the result would be chaos, not planning. Moreover, how do you ensure that the villagers are capable of understanding the national interest and overcoming their particular interests? Such phrases are only illusions.

In his 6th thesis, Richard sketches a rosy, idealistic picture of a future eco-socialist society and its citizens. That may be attractive to him, me and other eco-socialists. But this future lies in distant future. First, we would need a long transition periodof contracting economies, and that would cause a lot of painto millions of people spoilt by consumerism or promises of a consumerist future. We shall have to convince such people, and that would be an altogether difficult job. We should tell them the truth, namely that austerity isnecessary for saving the earth. We can promisethem only one thing, namely that all the pains and burdens, as well as the benefits of austerity, will be equitablydistributed among all.

What to Do About Jobs?

(4) Richard writes: "Needless to say, retrenching and closing down such industries would mean job losses, millions of jobs from here to China. Yet if we don’t shut down those unsustainable industries, we’re doomed." And then he puts the question "What to do?" We can be sure that all people who wholly depend on a paid job for their livelihood, whom we must also win over, will confront us with this jobs question. Let me finish my contribution to this conversation with an answer to this question.

There is not much use talking to ourselves, the already converted. We need to startwork, immediately and all over the world, especially in those countries where poverty and unemployment are very high. We know that, generally, these countries are also those where population growth is very high. People from the rich countries cannot simply tell their people, sorry, we have to close down many factories and we cannot further invest in industrializing your countries. But the former can tell the latter that they can help them in controlling population growth. The latter will understand easily that it is an immediately effective way to reduce poverty and unemployment. A massive educative campaign will, of course, be necessary, in addition to concrete monetary and technical help.

In the rich countries, contrary to what Richard perhaps thinks, it will not be possible to provide new equivalent jobs to replace those jobs we need to abolish. For such countries, reducing working hours and job-sharing in the short term, and, in the long term, ostracizing automation and labor-saving technologies, and using labor-intensive methods of production instead,are together the only solution. That is already known. Another thing that would be needed is to negate free trade and international competition. However, it must also be said openly that high wages and salaries cannot be earned under such circumstances.

We eco-socialist activists must begin the work with a massive world-wide political campaign in favor of such ideas and policies.

I lost my beloved Sunny on Thanksgiving Day, November 23, 2017.Sunny suffered from chronic kidney disease (CKD) and lung cancer.The night before her death she had trouble breathing probably due to the spread of her lung cancer.She was euthanized at about 9:30 in the morning while resting on my lap.

Sunny’s troubles surfaced on the day before Christmas 2016 when she stopped eating.Her veterinarian tried everything in the book to find out why and couldn’t. Finally, a barium x-ray showed a possible obstruction in her stomach.Sunny was referred to the best surgeon in the area who suggested “exploratory survey.”As I found out later, that meant opening up Sunny’s underside with a long incision to examine the inside of her GI tract and take biopsies for pathological examination.The only thing they found was “moderate irritable bowel disease” (IBD), a form of allergy to food protein in various meats the cat eats. Of course, one does not need such an invasive surgery to diagnose IBD.The IBD diagnosis seemed to explain Sunny’s refusal to eat her old favorites and her lack of appetite.To recover from the surgery, Sunny was fitted with a feeding tube which I used to give her liquid food, water, and medication for a month.Sunny was now on a life-long daily dose of Prednisolone to control her IBD.

In June, Sunny was found to suffer from moderate chronic kidney disease (CKD), the number one cause of feline mortality.The prognosis for Sunny changed from a chronic but manageable IBD to terminal CKD.Typically, a cat with CKD is placed on special “kidney friendly”diet and supplements to help flush out toxins from her body. But Sunny was a finicky eater and would not eat a “kidney friendly” diet. And, the supplements I had to shove down her throat twice daily gave her a bad case of diarrhea.So, we settled for any food she would eat and stopped giving her the supplements. Thus, her prognosis became more dire. Still, finding food that Sunny liked and getting her to eat “just a bit more” became a constant concern of mine. And, she gradually ate less and less even of things she liked, except for rodents and birds.

In September, an x-ray taken for another purpose showed a dark spot in her lungs.The radiologist confirmed a rare lung cancer that afflicts mostly female cats.Sunny was now cornered by two terminal diseases.In late October, her veterinarian found a mass in Sunny’s mammary glands.Whether this was new cancer or metastasis of her lung cancer we did not know and had no practical value for her care. It was merely another sign the Sunny’s life is about to end.

Sunny was receiving subcutaneous (SQ) fluids four times a week, something like dialysis for cats, for which we made trips to her veterinarian hospital.Meanwhile, Sunny had lost more than 3.5 lb. since June. With about 6.5 lb. of weight, she was skin and bones.Still, Sunny ventured outside, enjoyed the garden, and hunted. A week before her demise, I found her munching on a field mouse under the rosemary bushes.

Sunny’s excellent veterinarian had warned me that if she began having a problem breathing, it would the time to let her go. The night before Thanksgiving at about 9 p.m., Sunny who laying on my lap choked.In reaction, she jumped off the bed and returned to the closet where she had camped the past few days and nights.Her eyes looked terrified and she seemed sick and in pain.I tried to calm her down giving her a dose of pain medication.She slept in the closet the rest of the night.

Thanksgiving Day morning, I took Sunny to the VCA Animal Center about 8 miles away that is open for emergency care all year round. Very caring and sensitive staff attended to Sunny and me.The technician and the veterinarian who examined and treated Sunny had tears in their eyes when they were caring for Sunny. Their examination room looked more like a cozy living room with a love-seat.I sat on the sofa and placed Sunny on my lap on a soft blanket.She seemed comfortable and resigned.After examining Sunny, the veterinarian concurred that it is time to let Sunny go.Sunny was given a pain medication and within 10 minutes she was relaxed and sleepy. Then her right forearm was fitted with a catheter.After once again asking for my agreement, the veterinarian gave Sunny another dose of strong pain medication through the catheter that relaxed her completely. The veterinarian again with my permission injected Sunny through the catheter with the medication that stopped her heart.Sunny gave a slight sigh and I was left all alone to pick up the pieces of my broken heart.

* * *

I first met Sunny on Christmas morning of 2011. Returning home from serving breakfast to Lulu and Calico (see, “The Feral Cat Colony on Darby Road,” Part 1, and, Part 2), I stopped by the mailboxes to pick up my copy of the New York Times. I noticed a tiny orange cat disappearing behind the blackberry bushes.The next day, I called her and she stopped under the first row of the bushes. I opened a can of food and served it in a bowl to her.She quickly came and ate what I had served.She was not satisfied until she had eaten three 5.5 oz cans of cat food.Within days, she was comfortable enough with me to eat her food inside a cat carrier. The next day, I closed the cat carrier door and took her to the veterinarian hospital.She was examined, tested for infections (negative), given a rabies shot, and we went home where Mooshi and Sayda, both female cats, both very domineering, also lived.Sayda, a badly mistreated feral cat from Darby Road, lived upstairs away from the rest of us and Mooshi lived downstairs.Sunny spent her first night in the master bathroom. On the second night, I left the bathroom door open and sat on the sofa near it watching a rented Netflix movie.Sunny stepped out and soon enough jumped into my lap.We became movie buddies for the rest of her life.Every night, Sunny patiently waited for me to finish my dinner, clean up, wash the dishes, and take a little fruit to have while watching part of a movie and Sunny would jump on my lap to watch it together.Six years later, I cannot really enjoy watching a movie nearly as much without her on my lap.

Sunny now was free to explore inside of the house but she preferred spending most of her time hiding behind the books on the bookshelves (she preferred the philosophy section). She was tiny enough to fit there and was out of Mooshi’s way who was not entirely happy that I bought in another female cat.

Sunny’s demeanor helped explain why she was so tiny. The more aggressive feral cats ate whatever was available to them first and Sunny went on deprived. But that also helped her avoid getting bitten by other cats who often carry infections (most feral cats are feline immunodeficiency virus—FIV—positive). Soon, I let Sunny venture outside.She promptly went to the blackberry bushes on the opposite side of Darby Road, where a gate close off the road and there is no car traffic and few people go by.At the end each day, I had to “recapture” Sunny and carry her in my arms home for the night.Sometimes, Oliver, the neighbor’s dog, barked at us from behind the fence causing Sunny to sink her sharp claws into my body.After about three months of doing this Sunny went out and came back home on her own.

She also put on a fair amount of weight having a regular supply of food. She even developing a bit of love-handles.Mooshi also accepted Sunny’s presence.Both of them eventually slept on my bed, each in her own cat bed.But it was Mooshi who would come to lay across my legs at night. Unbeknown to me, Sunny also wanted to do that but not as long as Mooshi was around.When Mooshi was incapacitated enough not to want to come to my bed, Sunny began laying on my legs facing the opposite direction until my legs were tired.This became our nightly routine.

For her entire life, Sunny remained shy of other people.When someone visited me Sunny disappeared into the garden. And when the visitor left, she would magically reappear.This limited my ability to invite people for dinner or when the weather was too harsh for Sunny to be outside.A few of my friends understood the circumstances but most did not. Some friends even felt insulted that I would inconvenience them “for a cat.”While I fully understand the reasons for their feelings, that our culture gives priority to humans over all other beings, I simply explained why I felt Sunny’s feelings were as important to me as their feelings. I have found few who really understand my reasoning. The notion of human superiority is deeply ingrained in our culture.

** *

Like all relationships, those with cats can evolve and become richer.A difference with human relations is that those with nonhuman animals never fall apart, not at least because of their failings.Thus, all my relationships with cats continually enriched throughout their lives. That is one reason it is hard for me to see them die even when they have lived a long and happy life.I miss our relationship that we built together for as long as I have known them.I have little doubt that Sunny loved me perhaps more than I loved her as she always sought to be with me whenever she thought I was available. For some reasons, from our initial meeting she decided that I was worthy of her trust.Over time, Sunny’s trust in me increased even when she became increasingly ill and I had to force her to take medications which she did not like, take her the hospital where she was handled by various people even though she was very shy of other people, or when she was subject to harsh intervention from frequent administration of SQ fluids which required the insertion of a large needle in her back to major abdominal surgery and having to live with a feeding tube in her neck for a month. We humans justify such harsh interventions as treatment for our illnesses.There is no evidence that cats and other nonhuman animals understand that such treatments are “for their own good.”But they put up with it.And Sunny never lost her trust in me despite all the hardship I put her through.

Like all other beings that I have known, Sunny had her routines which she enjoyed.Each morning after I had my breakfast, Sunny expected me to sit on the sofa so she can jump on my lap and have her fur brushed.She really enjoyed this even though in the last year of her life it meant also being forced to take medications she did not like.Sunny also liked laying on my legs facing the other way as I stretch on the sofa or on the bed to rest or when I was sleeping.She had her favorite spots in the garden where she could “hide” from danger which included under the rosemary bushes, deer grasses, and Mexican grasses, and under the low-hanging branches of the redwood tree by the road where there is often a warm afternoon sun.She also liked to have her meals served in the garden or on top of one of the chairs around the dining table.When I arrived home after being away for a few hours, Sunny greeted me under the pineapple agave bush that if I had a better sense of smell would still have her scent as she rubbed her chin against it hundreds of time as a way to greet me. Sunny had graceful movements that began with making an arch in her back by extending her forearms way in front of her while raising her tail into the sky above. She was a patient hunter spending a lot of time focused on a rodents’ hole.Once she was hunting where I spread seeds for wild turkeys and other birds.When the turkeys arrived Sunny would not budge. Interestingly, the turkeys ate seeds around her but did not mind her being next to them.

Sunny yielded to other cats.Mooshi who was the dominant cat in the house soon accepted Sunny even though they were both females.She felt no threat from Sunny and decided to let her live in the house and share my care and affection.Panther who is a younger, much stronger, tomcat and likes to bully more submissive cats chased Sunny many times despite my protest.But gradually two things happened. Sunny began to stand her own ground somewhat. And Panther began to heed me to stop harassing Sunny.Sunny actually liked Panther and given the chance she liked smelling his face.Earlier, that was followed by Panther chasing Sunny to beat her up.One day about a year ago a deflection point was reached. When Sunny went to smell Panther’s face, Panther reached out to her by licking Sunny’s forehead.Panther’s aggression towards Sunny subsided.

Sunny was a gentle, feminine soul who often felt at ease sitting in the garden in a warm spot or “watching” a movie with me at night or being in my company anytime. Perhaps because of this strong bond of friendship between us, I miss her very much. Since her death, there is a constant gap in my daily life. I miss her gentle soul, her devotion, and the warmth of her body close to mine.There is a world of difference between watching a movie or watching a movie with Sunny on my lap.

My beloved Sunny, you will be in my heart and mind for as long as I live.

Notes:I am grateful to a host of people who cared for Sunny at Analy Veterinary Hospital in Sebastopol, California, especially to Dr. Jessica Baldwin, her regular veterinarian, and Dr. Patricia Alexander, who was there for us when we needed help.

The following video is 3 minutes and 39 seconds long with 72 photos of Sunny. Frank Sinatra's "This Love of Mine" is the soundtrack.

Monday, November 27, 2017

Moishe Postone has produced a weighty work on central, categorical questions of Marx’s critique of the economy. It is in no way a merely academic exercise. The vanishing point of even his most abstract considerations is the question of how to analyze contemporary changes in capitalism.

Postone’s critique is directed in the first instance against the “traditional” Marxism predominant in the labor movement, for which exploitation, class rule, and above all a positively understood proletarian labor oppressed by capital which was to be finally realized in socialism, were the central points of reference. This Marxism, according to Postone, is not only unfit as the basis for analysis; its conception of socialism, which aims merely at changing relations of property, but not at a fundamental revolution in the mode of production, supposedly offers no real emancipatory perspective.

Postone opposes to this a “new interpretation” of Marx’s theory, which places abstract labor as a form of social mediation specific to capitalism at the center of analysis. What Postone refers to as “abstract domination” is based upon this form of mediation: a structural compulsion which is not localized to a specific place or which is exercised by a specific center of power, but rather to which all members of bourgeois society are subordinated. Postone does not at all deny the existence of exploitation and class rule, but in his work they have a different significance than in traditional Marxism.

Postone’s approach has its roots in the “new Marx discussion” as it developed in various countries of Western Europe in the 1960s in the wake of the student movement and the protests against the Vietnam War. In the West German discussion of the 1970s, which Postone experienced up close and personal while living in Frankfurt am Main between 1972 and 1982, the economistic truncations of Marx’s theory were already being criticized. Against the traditional reduction of Marx’s theory to a “political economy of the working class”, which in principle posed the same questions as political economy and merely provided different answers, the new discussions emphasized that Marx’s critique of economy was a fundamental critique of bourgeois categories and not merely a critique of the results obtained through these categories. Beyond restricted problematics of academic economics, Marx is concerned with the fetishistic social relations of a commodity-producing, capitalist society.

So, not all of Postone’s “new interpretation” is as new as he constantly stresses. Above all, Postone’s book shares a central deficit with the project of a “reconstruction of the critique of political economy” advanced by various authors and groups. This enterprise focused upon the misinterpretations of the past and the fragmentary character of Marx’s Capital manuscripts, which made a “reconstruction” necessary in the first place. But the ambivalences and inconsistencies present in Marx’s own work were eclipsed.

Postone follows this interpretive schematic. During his recent lecture tour of Germany [in 2004. – translator’s note], he emphasized that the point for him was not “what Marx really said”, but rather an interpretation that could be used for analysis. But then, one must be clear about the state of Marx’s raw material that forms the basis of this interpretation. On the one hand, Marx consummates a radical break with the theoretical field of classical political economy (i.e. its self-evident categories). On the other hand, in many places Marx is unable to extricate himself from this theoretical field. For example: concerning the physiological determination of abstract labor, which directly contradicts its determination as a relation of social validation; or his fixation upon a money commodity; or his attempt at a quantitative transformation of values into prices of production.

Such ambivalences between old and new are not at all unusual for somebody who has consummated a scientific revolution (compare Galileo’s role in the history of physics). By consistently ignoring these ambivalences and inconsistencies, Postone is forced into rather implausible interpretations, for example concerning the physiological determination of abstract labor. Postone argues that Marx didn’t intend for this determination to be understood in that way; rather, Marx allegedly deals with a form of appearance that he later criticizes. Or, in the case of the value-price transformation, Postone only engages with the most harmless of its critics, Böhm-Bawerk. The more substantive debate that occurred later is completely ignored by Postone.

However, not only is Postone’s method of interpretation problematic, but also some of his results. In his conception of both value and capital, everything to do with ‘circulation’ — above all money — is consistently excluded. Postone correctly emphasizes that abstract labor is a specific relation of social mediation. But the fact that this relation requires a specific objective manifestation, which it first obtains in money, has no importance for Postone’s concept of value. But if money is, as Marx writes in the _Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_, the “immediate form of existence” of abstract labor, then the theory of money cannot be, as it was both in traditional Marxism and in Postone’s work, merely an appendage of value theory, but rather its constitutive component.

Then, as Hans-Georg Backhaus had worked out in the 70s, the decisive boundary is not between labor and utility theories of value, but rather between pre-monetary theories of value, theories that attempt to develop the concept of value without any reference to money (which includes both bourgeois utility theories of value as well as the traditional Marxist labor theory of value) and Marx’s monetary theory of value as a categorical critique of pre-monetary approaches.

This lopsidedness of Postone’s conception of the theory of value is continued in his concept of capital, which is developed solely from the perspective of production, as introduced by Marx in the first volume of Capital. What is behind this is Postone’s correct criticism of traditional Marxism, which sought to transcend the anarchy of the market through planning, but which hardly problematized the conditions of production of industrial capitalism.

However, concentrating upon the production side of things can also lead to a lopsided picture. The circulation of the total social capital, the equalization of the average rate of profit, and the mediation of these processes by credit relations are not simply additional processes that one can deal with or not. Capital is not at all possible as a socially all-encompassing relation of production without credit relations. The dynamic of capital cannot be grasped solely in terms of the sphere of production. Rather, the unity of production and circulation is always the precondition of this dynamic. That is particularly valid for an understanding of those processes which have been dealt with in the last decade under the keyword “globalization” and in which an internationalized financial system plays a central role.

With regard to the political consequences of Postone’s approach, it is above all the absence of a critique of the state which proves to be problematic. It is a categorical gap. Postone touches upon the historically variable relationship between the state and capital – the liberal phase in which the state hardly got involved in the economy was followed by an interventionist stage, which is now supposedly replaced by a neoliberal stage – but this historical observation is not grounded in a categorical analysis of the state. That which Postone correctly regards as a strength of Marx’s analysis of capital – namely that Marx’s concept of capital is not limited to a specific historical configuration, but rather that capital is a social relationship connected to various historical configurations – he does not appear to apply in the same manner to the state.

This missing categorical anaylsis of the state thus makes it possible for Postone to write in an uncritical manner about democracy and democratic self-determination. Postone, who convincingly criticizes the ahistorical conception of economic categories, appears in contrast to share an ahistorical conception of democracy. Instead of Postone reflecting upon democracy as a specific form of mediation of the “abstract domination” that he emphasizes, democracy appears in his rather vague statements as a trans-historical form of organization of the political, which is inhibited by “unequal relations of power,” which encounters better or worse conditions for its realization, and which will finally be fully realized in socialism. Thus Postone remains, even if this was not his intention, chained to a discourse which merely confronts real conditions (really existing democracy) with an idealization of these conditions (true democracy). But the real goal should be a critique of the political categories of bourgeois society which is adequate to the critique of economic categories.

Only with that, by the way, would the categorical level have been reached where one can speak adequately of classes and class struggles. Postone’s critique of the traditional Marxist inflation of class struggle nonetheless shares its notion that one can speak of classes and class struggles solely on the basis of the economic structure. It is thus not the economistically truncated concept of class that Postone calls into question, but rather its status.

Everyone wants everything – how is that going to work? The promise of economic growth is that the poor can live like the rich and the rich can live like the oligarchs. But already we are bursting through the physical limits of the planet that sustains us. Climate breakdown, soil loss, the collapse of habitats and species, the sea of plastic, insectageddon: all are driven by rising consumption. The promise of private luxury for everyone cannot be met: neither the physical nor the ecological space exists.

But growth must go on: this is everywhere the political imperative. And we must adjust our tastes accordingly. In the name of autonomy and choice, marketing uses the latest findings in neuroscience to break down our defences. Those who seek to resist must, like the Simple Lifers in Brave New World, be silenced – in this case by the media. With every generation, the baseline of normalised consumption shifts. Thirty years ago, it was ridiculous to buy bottled water, where tap water is clean and abundant. Today, worldwide, we use a million plastic bottles a minute.

Every Friday is a Black Friday, every Christmas a more garish festival of destruction. Among the snow saunas, portable watermelon coolers and smartphones for dogs with which we are urged to fill our lives, my #extremecivilisation prize now goes to the PancakeBot: a 3-D batter printer that allows you to eat the Mona Lisa or the Taj Mahal or your dog’s bottom every morning. In practice, it will clog up your kitchen for a week until you decide you don’t have room for it. For junk like this we’re trashing the living planet and our own prospects of survival. Everything must go.

The ancillary promise is that, through green consumerism, we can reconcile perpetual growth with planetary survival. But a series of research papers reveal that there is no significant difference between the ecological footprints of people who care about their impacts and people who don’t. One recent article, published in the journal Environment and Behaviour, finds that those who identify themselves as conscious consumers use more energy and carbon than those who do not.

Why? Because, environmental awareness tends to be higher among wealthy people. It is not attitudes that govern our impacts on the planet, but income. The richer we are, the bigger our footprint, regardless of our good intentions. Those who see themselves as green consumers, the paper found, “mainly focus on behaviours that have relatively small benefits.”

I know people who recycle meticulously, save their plastic bags, carefully measure the water in their kettles, then take their holidays in the Caribbean, cancelling their environmental savings 100-fold. I’ve come to believe that the recycling licences their long-haul flights. It persuades people they’ve gone green, enabling them to overlook their greater impacts.

None of this means that we should not try to reduce our impacts, but we should be aware of the limits of the exercise. Our behaviour within the system cannot change the outcomes of the system. It is the system that needs to change.

Research by Oxfam suggests that the world’s richest 1% (if your household has an income of £70,000 or more, this means you) produce around 175 times as much carbon as the poorest 10%. How, in a world in which everyone is supposed to aspire to high incomes, can we avoid turning the Earth, on which all prosperity depends, into a dust ball?

By decoupling, the economists tell us: detaching economic growth from our use of materials. So how well is this going?A paper in the journal PlosOne finds that while in some countries relative decoupling has occurred, “no country has achieved absolute decoupling during the past 50 years.” What this means is that the amount of materials and energy associated with each increment of GDP might decline, but, as growth outpaces efficiency, the total use of resources keeps rising. More importantly, the paper reveals that, in the long term, both absolute and relative decoupling from the use of essential resources is impossible, because of the physical limits of efficiency.

A global growth rate of 3% means that the size of the world economy doubles every 24 years. This is why environmental crises are accelerating at such a rate. Yet the plan is to ensure that it doubles and doubles again, and keeps doubling in perpetuity. In seeking to defend the living world from the maelstrom of destruction, we might believe we are fighting corporations and governments and the general foolishness of humankind. But they are all proxies for the real issue: perpetual growth on a planet that is not growing.

Those who justify this system insist that economic growth is essential for the relief of poverty. But a paper in the World Economic Review finds that the poorest 60% of the world’s people receive only 5% of the additional income generated by rising GDP. As a result, $111 of growth is required for every $1 reduction in poverty. This is why, on current trends, it would take 200 years to ensure that everyone receives $5 a day. By this point, average per capita income will have reached $1m a year, and the economy will be 175 times bigger than it is today. This is not a formula for poverty relief. It is a formula for the destruction of everything and everyone.

When you hear that something makes economic sense, this means it makes the opposite of common sense. Those sensible men and women who run the world’s treasuries and central banks, who see an indefinite rise in consumption as normal and necessary, are beserkers, smashing through the wonders of the living world, destroying the prosperity of future generations to sustain a set of figures that bear ever less relation to general welfare.

Green consumerism, material decoupling, sustainable growth: all are illusions, designed to justify an economic model that is driving us to catastrophe. The current system, based on private luxury and public squalor, will immiserate us all: under this model, luxury and deprivation are one beast with two heads.

We need a different system, rooted not in economic abstractions but in physical realities, that establish the parameters by which we judge its health. We need to build a world in which growth is unnecessary, a world of private sufficiency and public luxury. And we must do it before catastrophe forces our hand.

The British Communist Party erected this structure in 1956. Marx's original grave was 100 meters to the north.

The objective of the following observations is to offer a rough overview of central ways of reading Marx’s theory. These are to be presented – by means of a few selected topics – as Marxisms that can be relatively clearly delimited from one another, and the history of their reception and influence will be evaluated with regard to the common-sense understanding of “Marxist theory.”

A distinction will be made between the hitherto predominant interpretation of Marx, primarily associated with political parties (traditional Marxism, Marxism in the singular, if you will), and the dissident, critical forms of reception of Marx (Marxisms in the plural), with their respective claims of a “return to Marx.” The first interpretation is understood as a product and process of a restricted reading of Marx, in part emerging from the “exoteric” layer of Marx’s work, which updates traditional paradigms in political economy, the theory of history, and philosophy. Systematized and elevated to a doctrine by Engels, Kautsky, et al, it succumbs to the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production and culminates in the apologetic science of Marxism-Leninism. The other two interpretations, specifically Western Marxism as well as the German neue Marx-Lektüre (“new reading of Marx”), usually explore the “esoteric” content of Marx’s critique and analysis of society, often consummated outside of institutionalized, cumulative research programs, by isolated actors in the style of an “underground Marxism.”

In order to characterize both ways of reading, some strongly truncated theses, limited to a few aspects, must suffice. In particular the ambitious proposition, first formulated by Karl Korsch, of an “application of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of history itself” – one that goes beyond the mere presentation of intellectual history, towards an immanent theoretical critique that critically considers the connection between historical forms of praxis and theoretical formations of Marxism – cannot be carried out here. In addition, a consideration of those readings which are critical of Marx or Marxism can also be disregarded here, insofar as their picture of Marx usually corresponds to that of traditional Marxism.

I therefore begin with the hegemonic interpretative model of traditional Marxism, and only at the end of my presentation will I conclude with a few positive determinations of what I regard as the fundamental systematic intention of Marx’s work. I do this primarily because a differentiated reading of Marx’s work can only be gained in the course of the learning processes of Western Marxism and the neue Marx-Lektüre.

I. Marxism

The term “Marxism” was probably first used in the year 1879 by the German Social Democrat Franz Mehring to characterize Marx’s theory, and established itself at the end of the 1880s as a discursive weapon used by both critics and defenders of “Marx’s teachings.” The birth of a “Marxist school,” however, is unanimously dated back to the publication of Anti-Dühring by Friedrich Engels in the year 1878, and the subsequent reception of this work by Karl Kautsky, Eduard Berstein, et al. Engels’ writings – even if the terms “Marxism” or “dialectical materialism,” the self-applied labels of traditional readings, do not yet appear in them – supplied entire generations of readers, Marxists as well as anti-Marxists, with the interpretative model through which Marx’s work was perceived. In particular, the review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), the late work Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), and the supplement to Volume III of Capital (1894/95), achieved an influence that can hardly be underestimated. Above all, however, it was Anti-Dühringthat was to be stylized as the textbook of Marxist theory as well as a positive depiction of a “Marxist worldview”: for Kautsky, “there is no other book that has contributed so much to the understanding of Marxism. Marx’s Capital is greater. But it was first through Anti-Dühring that we learned to correctly read and understand Capital.” And for Lenin, it is one of the “handbooks of every class-conscious worker.”1

At the same time, a general characteristic of the history of “Marxism” is consummated: the initiators of the theoretical corpus regard it as “unnecessary […] to themselves make an appearance as eponyms […] the eponyms are not the real speakers” (Georges Labica). In many respects, Marxism is Engels’ work and for that reason actually an Engelsism. In what follows I will name only three points which an ideologized and restricted reception of Marx could draw upon.

I.1 The Ontological-Determinist Tendency

Scientific socialism was conceived of as an ontological system, a “science of the big picture.” The materialist dialectic functions here as a “general law of development of nature, society, and thought,”2 while nature serves for Engels as a “proof of dialectics.”3 Engels already undertakes a false analogy between historical-social processes and natural phenomena by the mere fact that in his elucidation of the main features of the dialectic, reference to subject and object is missing. “Negation of the negation” or the “transformation of quantity into quality” are identified in the changes in the physical state of water or in the development of a grain of barley. Against a static point of view, dialectic is supposed to demonstrate the “becoming,” the “transitory character” of all existence,4 and is bound to traditional dichotomies of the philosophy of consciousness, such as the so-called “great basic question of all philosophy “as to which component of the relationship between “thinking and being” has primacy.5 The dialectic is split into “two sets of laws,” into the dialectic of “the external world” and the dialectic of “human thought,” whereby the latter is understood to be merely a passive mental image of the former.6 Engels constricts – even distorts – the three elementary praxis-philosophical motifs of Marx, which he had partially still advocated in his earlier writings:

The recognition that not only the object, but also the observation of the object is historically and practically mediated,7 not external to the history of the mode of production. Against this, Engels emphasizes that “the materialist outlook on nature means nothing more than the simple conception of nature just as it is, without alien addition.”8 The naive realism of the theory of reflection systematized by Lenin9 and others – which falls prey to the reified appearance of immediacy of that which is socially mediated, the fetishism of an in-itself of that which exists only via a historically determined framework of human activity – already obtains its foundation in Engels’ writings.10 As “things refer to consciousness and consciousness refers to things,”11 the concepts of praxis and the subjective mediation of the object, as well as ideology-critical considerations, have hardly any place in this paradigm.

The concept of Naturwüchsigkeit (“the state of being naturally derived”), which Engels had used in The German Ideology in a negative sense, is now turned into a positive concept. The sublation of specific social laws resting upon the unconsciousness of social actors is no longer postulated; rather, Engels postulates the conscious application of “the general laws of motion […] of the external world.”12

If Marx writes in the Theses on Feuerbach that “all mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice,”13 Engels reduces praxis to the experimental activity of the natural sciences.14 Admittedly, ambivalences and praxis-philosophical motifs can also be found in the writings of the late Engels, which were largely blotted out by the epigones. Nonetheless, Engels, bundling together the scientism of his epoch, paves the way for a mechanistic and fatalistic conception of historical materialism by shifting the accent from a theory of social praxis to one of a contemplative, reflection-theory doctrine of development.

The vulgar evolutionism of nineteenth-century European Social Democracy is a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon.15 For that reason, it is not just for Kautsky, Bernstein, and Bebel that the deterministic concept of development and the revolutionary metaphysic of a providential mission of the proletariat16 occupy a central place in Marxist doctrine. Accordingly, humanity is subordinated to a “scientifically verifiable” automatism of liberation. That which presents itself in the modern scientific garb of a fetishism of laws is ultimately nothing other than a historical metaphysic with a socialist signature17: precisely the inversion of subject and object that Marx had criticized. A process consummated behind the back of social actors is attributed a morally qualified aim.18 Ultimately, in the Erfurt Program of the German Social Democratic Party, this revolutionary passivity19 is codified at an official level as consistent Marxism: the task of the party is to remain braced for an event that will “necessarily” happen even without intervention, “not to make the revolution, but rather to take advantage of it.”20 The ontological orientation and the encyclopaedic character of Engels’ deliberations also feed the tendency to interpret scientific socialism as a comprehensive proletarian worldview. Ultimately, Lenin will present the “Marxist doctrine” as “omnipotent,” a “comprehensive and harmonious” doctrine that “provides men with an integral world outlook.”21Correspondingly, the negative concept of ideology is neutralized into a category for the determinate being of consciousness in general.

All of these developments, which undoubtedly constitute a theoretical regression, ultimately culminate in the theory of “Marxism-Leninism” conceived of by Abram Deborin and Josef Stalin. If for Lenin, Marxism constitutes – despite all emphasis upon the political – a “profound doctrine of development”22 that calls attention to breaks and leaps in nature and society, in the case of Marxism-Leninism the naturalist-objectivist current is elevated to a state doctrine. The central argumentative figure will be: what is valid for nature must also be valid for history. Or: nature makes leaps, therefore so does history. Political praxis is thus understood as the consummation of historical laws. This impressive logic is perfected in Stalin’s work “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” – for decades an authoritative work in the Marxist theory of the Eastern Bloc. Historical materialism stands for the “application” and “extension” of ontological principles to society, which implies an epistemological essentialism (a theory of reflection, which in the form of Dialectical Materialism conceives of “being” and “thinking” independent of the concept of praxis) and a sociological naturalism (a developmental logic – to be “consciously applied” or “accelerated” by the party as the highest technocratic instance23 – existing independent of human agency).24

I.2 The Historicist Interpretation of the Form-Genetic Method

If Lenin’s statement that “none of the Marxists for the past half century have understood Marx” – a dictum that in this case however also applies to Lenin himself – has any validity, then it is certainly with regard to the interpretation of the critique of political economy. Even 100 years after the publication of the first volume of Capital, Engels’ commentary was widely regarded as the sole legitimate and adequate assessment of Marx’s critique of economy. No reading in the Marxist tradition was as uncontroversial as the one casually developed by Engels in texts such as the review of Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) or the supplement to Volume III of Capital (1894). Here, considerably more explicitly than in the objectivist conception of historical materialism, Marxism is Engelsism.

Against the background of his conception of reflection, Engels interprets the first chapter of Capital as a simultaneously logical and historical presentation of “simple commodity production” developing toward the relations of capitalist wage labor, “only stripped of the historical form and diverting chance occurrences.”25 The term “logical” in this context basically means nothing more than “simplified.” The method of presentation, the sequence of categories (commodity, the elementary, expanded, and general forms of value, money, capital) in the critique of political economy is accordingly “simply the reflection, in abstract and theoretically consistent form, of the historical course.”26 The examination of the genesis of the money form is understood as the description of “an actual event which really took place at some time or other” and not as “an abstract mental process that takes place solely in our mind.”27 In no other passage of his work does Engels so drastically reduce historical materialism to a vulgar empiricism and historicism, as is made evident by his associative chain “materialism – empirically verifiable facts – real process” vs. “idealism – abstract thought process – purely abstract territory.”

With the “logical-historical” method, Engels provides a catchphrase that will be recited and stressed ad nauseam in the Marxist orthodoxy. Karl Kautsky, in his enormously influential presentations, understood Capital to be an “essentially historical work”28: “Marx was charged with recognizing capital to be a historical category and to prove its emergence in history, rather than mentally constructing it.”29 Rudolf Hilferding also claims that “in accordance with the dialectic method, conceptual evolution runs parallel throughout with historical evolution.”30 Both Marxism-Leninism31 and Western Marxism32 follow Hilferding in this assessment. But if the critique of political economy is interpreted as historiography, then consequentially the categories at the beginning must correspond directly to empirical objects, for example a dubious pre-capitalist commodity not determined by price,33 and the analysis of the form of value must begin with the depiction of a coincidental, moneyless interaction of two commodity owners – with Engels’ so-called “simple production of commodities,”34 an economic epoch he dates from 6000 BC to the 15th century AD. According to this conception, Marx’s law of value35 operates at times in this epoch in a pure form “unadulterated” by the category of price, which Engels illustrates with the feigned example of a moneyless “exchange” between medieval peasants and artisans.

Here we are dealing with a transparent social interrelationship between immediate producers who are at the same time the owners of their means of production, in which one producer labors under the watchful eye of the other, and therefore “the peasant of the Middle Ages knew fairly accurately the labor-time required for the manufacture of the articles obtained by him in barter.”36 Under the conditions of this “natural exchange”, it is not some normative criterion that is for him “the only suitable measure for the quantitative determination of the values to be exchanged,”37 but rather the abstraction of a labor-time consciously and directly measured by the actors. Neither the peasant nor the artisan is so stupid as to exchange unequal quantities of labor38: “No other exchange is possible in the whole period of peasant natural economy than that in which the exchanged quantities of commodities tend to be measured more and more according to the amounts of labor embodied in them.”39 According to Engels, the value of a commodity is determined consciously by the labor, measured in time, of individual producers. In this theory of value, money does not play a constitutive role. On the one hand, it is an expedient and lubricant to trade that is external to value, but on the other it serves to obscure the substance of value: suddenly, instead of exchanging according to hours of labor, at some point exchange is conducted by means of cows and then pieces of gold. The question of how this notion of every commodity being its own labor-money40 can be reconciled with the conditions of private production based upon the division of labor is not posed by Engels. Engels – as will be elaborated by the neue Marx-Lektüre – practices exactly what Marx criticizes in the case of the classical economists, above all Adam Smith: a projection onto the past of the illusory notion of appropriation through one’s own labor, which in fact only exists in capitalism; neglect of the necessary connection between value and form of value41; a transformation of the “objective equalization” of unequal acts of labor consummated by the objective social relationship itself into a merely subjective consideration of social actors.42

Up until the 1960s, Engels’ theorems continued to be passed on undisputed. Along with his formula (once again taken from Hegel) of freedom being the insight into necessity, and the drawing of parallels between natural laws and social processes, they gave sustenance to a social-technological “concept of emancipation,” according to the following premise: social necessity (above all the law of value), which operates anarchically and uncontrolled in capitalism, will be, by means of Marxism as a science of the objective laws of nature and society, managed and applied according to a plan. Not the disappearance of capitalist form-determinations, but rather their alternative use characterizes this “socialism of adjectives” (this term comes from Robert Kurz) and “socialist political economy.”43 There is a significant disproportion between, on the one hand, the emphasis upon the “historical,” and on the other, the absence of a historically specific and socio-theoretically reflected concept of economic objectivity. This is made evident by the irrelevance of the concept of social form in the discussions of traditional Marxism, in which it is at most is considered to be s a category for ideal or marginal circumstances, but not a constitutive characteristic of Marx’s scientific revolution.44

I.3 The Critique of the Content of the State

Engels’ theoretical statements concerning the state in The Origin of the Family, Ludwig Feuerbach, Anti-Dühring, and his critique of the Erfurt draft program of the SPD from 1891, constitute the source of the traditional Marxist conception of the state. In Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels states that the fact that all needs in class societies are articulated through the will of the state is “the formal aspect of the matter – the one which is self-evident.”45The main question of a materialist theory of the state, however, is “what is the content of this merely formal will – of the individual as well as of the state – and whence is this content derived? Why is just this willed and not something else?”46 The result of this purely content-based question concerning the will of the state is for Engels the recognition “that in modern history the will of the state is, on the whole, determined by the changing needs of civil society, by the supremacy of this or that class, in the last resort, by the development of the productive forces and relations of exchange.”47 Furthermore, in his deliberations in The Origin of the FamilyEngels works with universal-historical categories onto which modern designations like “public authority” are projected, and constantly assumes “direct relations of domination, immediate forms of class rule”48 in order to explain “the” state, which is consequentially understood as a mere instrument of the ruling class. From this content-fixated and universal-historical way of considering the state, it can be deduced that Engels loses sight of the actually interesting question, namely as to why the class content in capitalism takes on the specific form of public authority.49 The personal definition of class rule extracted from pre-capitalist social formations ultimately leads to reducing the anonymous form of class rule institutionalized in the state to a mere ideological illusion, which, in the manner of the theory of priestly deception, is interpreted as a product of state tactics of deception. Engels in any case attempts to make the class character of the state plausible by referring to “plain corruption of officials” and “an alliance between the government and the stock exchange.”50Nonetheless, in Engels’ work there still exists, despite the predominance of the instrumentalist/content-fixated perspective, an unmediated coexistence between the determination of the state as the “state of the capitalists” and of the state as “ideal total capitalist.”51 The last definition conceives of the state “not as a tool of the bourgeoisie […] but rather as an entity of bourgeois society,”52 and an “organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists.”53 But the specific formal aspect of modern statehood is not yet explained by this reference to functional mechanisms. Engels also paved the way for the theory of state-monopoly capitalism.54 In the Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Program of 1891 he writes: “I am familiar with capitalist production as a social form, or an economic phase; capitalist private production being a phenomenon which in one form or another is encountered in that phase. What is capitalist private production? Production by separate entrepreneurs, which is increasingly becoming an exception. Capitalist production by joint-stock companies is no longer privateproduction but production on behalf of many associated people. And when we pass on from joint-stock companies to trusts, which dominate and monopolise whole branches of industry, this puts an end not only to private production but also to planlessness.”55 Finally, in Anti-Dühring Engels writes of the state as real total capitalist: “The more productive forces it takes over into its possession, the more it actually becomes a real aggregate capitalist, the more citizens it exploits.” Here Engels reveals a limited understanding of private production, and a tendency to equate state planning and monopoly power with direct socialization,56 reinforced by his construction of the fundamental contradiction and his tendency to identify the division of labor within a factory and the division of labor in society. Engels does note that “the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces,”57 but nonetheless sees an immediate transition to socialism setting in as a result, whereas the concepts of monopoly and state intervention remain “economically completely undetermined.”58 Engels thus suggests that the workers’ movement merely has to take over the forms of corporate bookkeeping in joint-stock companies and the comprehensive planning by monopolies developed in capitalism. For Engels, the bourgeoisie has already become obsolete through the separation of ownership and management functions.59 The “transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies and state property” demonstrates, according to Engels, “how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose”, i.e. for managing “modern productive forces”: “All the social functions of the capitalist are now performed by salaried employees. The capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first the capitalist mode of production forces out the workers. Now it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.”60

Reviewing this history of reception (only roughly outlined here), one could claim that Marxism in the form presented here was a rumor about Marx’s theory, a rumor that was gratefully taken up by most critics of “Marx” and merely supplemented with a minus sign. In fact such an assertion – as accurate as it may be overall – makes things too easy, in that it disregards certain deviations from the dominant doctrine that also understood themselves to be Marxisms, while also regarding the above misinterpretations as completely external to Marx’s own theory, thus excluding the possibility of any inconsistencies or theoretical-ideological ambiguities in Marx’s work. To clarify this question, a glance at the differentiated reading of Marx’s texts worked out in the so-called “reconstruction debates” will be useful.

In this respect, traditional Marxism should be understood here as an elaboration, systematization, and assumption of dominance of the ideological content of Marx’s work – within the framework of a reception by Engels and his epigones. Practical influence was almost exclusively allotted to these restricted and ideologized interpretations of Marx’s theory, as historical determinism or proletarian political economy.

II. Western Marxism

The formation of a Western Marxism61 arises from the crisis of the socialist workers’ movement in the wake of the First World War (the collapse of the Second International as a result of the policy of defense of the fatherland, the defeat of revolutions in Central and Southern Europe, the emergence of fascist forces, etc.). Here it is Georg Lukács’ and Karl Korsch’s texts published in 1923 which assume a paradigmatic character. Above all Lukács is considered the first Marxist theorist who at the level of social theory and methodology called into question the hitherto self-evident assumption of the complete identity of Marx’s and Engels’ theories. At the center of his critique stood Engels’ neglect of the subject-object dialectic as well as his concept of a dialectic of nature, to which the fatalism of Second International Marxism was oriented. Against this ontologization of historical materialism into a contemplative worldview, Lukács, like Western Marxism as a whole, understands Marx’s approach to be a critical revolutionary theory of social praxis. Against the scientistic talk of “objective laws of development” of social progress, Lukács posits the critique of ideology of reified consciousness, deciphering the capitalist mode of production as a historically specific form of social praxis ossified into a “second nature,” and emphasizing revolution as a critical act of practical subjectivity. Self-descriptions such as “philosophy of praxis” (Gramsci) or “critical theory of society” (Horkheimer) therefore do not constitute code words or conceptual equivalents for official party doctrine, but rather emphasize a learning process from which “arises a critical, action-oriented current of thought of Marxist heritage.”62 Although Western Marxism at first positively adopted the activist impulses of the October Revolution, its leading representatives would quickly come to reject the doctrine of Leninism, above all its continuation of a naturalistic social theory and its false universalization of the experience of the Russian Revolution. Georg Lukács’ critique of Bukharin’s “Theory of Historical Materialism” serves as an example of the former. In his critique, Lukács charges that Bukharin’s theory, with its concepts of the primacy of the development of the forces of production and the seamless application of the methods of natural science to the study of society, is fetishistic and obliterates the “qualitative difference” between the two subject areas of natural and social sciences, thus acquiring “the accent of a false ‘objectivity’ and mistaking the core idea of Marx’s method, namely the ascription of “all economic phenomena to the social relationships of human beings to one another.”63

In his Prison Notebooks, Gramsci provided the exemplary critique of the fixation of revolutionary strategy upon the model of the October Revolution. Initially, he had greeted the October Revolution as a “revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital,”64 that is to say as a refutation of the allegedly proven impossibility of socialist revolution in industrially backwards countries. In an almost religious manner, he cited the voluntaristic “socialist annunciation” as a source of a collective socialist “popular will” against a class consciousness mechanically derived from the economy and the level of its forces of production. Later, Gramsci would confront the Marxism of the Third International with his theory of hegemony, which rejects the “war of maneuver” of a frontal attack upon the repressive state apparatus as being a useless revolutionary strategy for modern Western capitalist societies. According to Gramsci, within these social formations “civil society” is composed of a labyrinthine structure of apparatuses in which patterns of thought and behavior are generated which exhibit an inertia that cannot be shaken by grandiose political deeds. The Russian revolutionary model is also condemned to failure in the West because the belief in the universal nature of experience of the Bolsheviks with a centralist-despotic Tsarism leads to a disregard for the relevance of ideological socialization by means of the apparatuses of civil society, and their effect: subjection in the form of autonomous agency. However, both Lukács and Gramsci remain loyal to the “exclusively proletarian” conception of revolution to the extent that the former, despite his reflections upon reified consciousness, still attributes an epistemological privilege to the proletariat guaranteed by its economic position, while Gramsci’s strategically motivated theory of civil society is fixated upon the room for maneuver of the working class.

With the attempt at a social-psychological exploration of the drive/structural foundations of the reproduction of an “irrational society,” above all in the form of authoritarian and antisemitic attitudes, the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, after Max Horkheimer’s assumption of its directorship in 1931, achieved a level of reflection that other representatives and currents of Western Marxism could not match,65 and which gives up on the reassuring support of an imagined class consciousness of the proletariat. Finally, the empirical class consciousness of the proletariat as the only existing class consciousness is subjected to analysis, while the “irrational,” emotional dimensions of social praxis ignored by other theorists, such as the social dimensions of the libidinal, are considered. This theoretical insight into the uncompromising nature of critical theory is at the same time an admission of the historical process of an increasing rift between emancipatory theory and the perspective of revolutionary praxis. With the propagation of socialism in one country, the Bolshevization of the Western Communist Parties, and the establishment of Marxism-Leninism as the official ideology of the Third International after the mid-1920s, there begins the characteristic isolation of the representatives of Western Marxism: this current is left with neither political influence nor (with the possible exception of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research) the institutional foundations for a normal scholarly praxis. The general characteristics of this Marxist formation – its sense for the Hegelian legacy and the critical-humanist potential of Marx’s theory, the incorporation of contemporary “bourgeois” approaches to elucidate the great crisis of the workers movement, the orientation towards methodology, the sensitization to social-psychological and cultural phenomena in connection with the question concerning the reasons for the failure of revolution in “the West”66 –provides the framework for a new type of restricted exegesis of Marx. This is essentially characterized by the neglect of problems of politics and state theory, a selective reception of Marx’s theory of value, and the predominance of a “silent orthodoxy” concerning the critique of political economy. Although the first to understand the character of capitalist rule the way Marx did – anonymous, objectively mediated, and having a life of its own – the “founding document” of Western Marxism, Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness, avoids a reconstruction of Marx’s theory of capitalism. Instead of an analysis of Marx’s dialectic of the form of value up to the form of capital, which in the theory of real subsumption offers an explanation of the connection – so decisive for Lukács – between commodification and the alienated structure of the labor process, one finds merely an analogizing combination of a value theory reduced to the “quantifying” value-form (due to an orientation towards Simmel’s cultural critique of money) and a diagnosis, oriented towards Max Weber, of the formal-rational tendency of the objectification of the labor process and modern law. Until the mid-1960s it seems that no Western Marxists extended their debate with traditional interpretations of Marx into the realm of value theory. Some positions go even further than this silent orthodoxy, and – without having seriously engaged with the critique of political economy – contrast the “humanist cultural critic Marx” with the “economist Marx” or even regard a “Marxism” without a critique of political economy as being possible.67

III. The “Neue Marx-Lektüre”

It was first within the framework of the “neue Marx-Lektüre” (“New Reading of Marx”), which emerged in the mid-1960s, that problems of state theory and economic theory once again played a role outside of Marxism-Leninism. This new wave of reception of Marx’s theory was also more or less situated outside of Stalinism and Social Democracy. Alongside the new reading in West European countries, there were isolated rudiments of a “new reading of Marx” occurring in Eastern Europe.68 Its genesis in West Germany coincided with phenomena such as the student movement, the first jolts to belief in a perpetual and politically manageable post-war prosperity, the breaking up of the anti-communist consensus in the course of the Vietnam War, etc., yet remained, despite its radical emancipatory claims, confined largely to academia. Here, we distinguish between this “new reading of Marx” in a broader sense69, and one more narrowly defined.70 Whereas the former was an international phenomenon, the latter was confined primarily to West Germany. If the former still remained predominantly trapped within Engelsian dogma with regard to the critique of political economy, the latter foregrounded the revision of previous historicist or empiricist interpretations of Marx’s form analysis. In terms of content, a threefold abandonment of central topoi of traditional Marxism was consummated in the main threads of the debate, themselves contradictory and in no way shared by all participants: a move away from a substantialist theory of value71; abandonment of manipulative-instrumental conceptions of the state72; and a move away from labor movement-centric interpretations of the critique of political economy, or interpretations based on a “labor-ontological” revolutionary theory (or even upon revolutionary theory as such).73 This new reading articulates its theoretical efforts in the form of a reconstruction of Marx’s theory.

With regard to the critique of economy, a crystallization of central questions and research tasks occurred within the framework of the 1967 colloquium “100 Jahre ‘Kapital.’”74 A reinterpretation of Marx’s critique was envisioned from the methodological perspective of social theory: the question as to the original object of Capital (economic form-determination), the particularity of scientific presentation (the dialectic of the forms of value), as well as the connection between the three volumes (“capital in general – many capitals”) are posed anew, as distinct from quantitative approaches, and with a particular emphasis upon the significance of the Grundrisse. Within the field of the conflict between “critical” and “structural” Marxisms, transitional moments of flight from existing methodological traditions arise, oblique to the classical points of conflict75: both structuralist anti-historicism as well as Hegelian figures of thought (“progressive-regressive method,” “return to the foundation”) play an important role in this.

Initially with a lot of “ifs and buts”76, and on some points remaining within the channels of traditional Marxism, the New Reading of Marx acquired more clearly defined contours over the course of the 1970s.

Against the classical myth of the complete equality between the paradigms of Marx and Engels, with regard to both historical materialism and the critique of political economy, Engels’ commentaries were criticized as largely inadequate to Marx’s work and remaining at a purely “exoteric” level that perpetuated traditional paradigms. Thus, in 1974 Hans-Georg Backhaus emphasized with regard to value theory that the critique was aimed “at an interpretative premise which until recently was considered one of the few uncontested elements of the Marxist literature, and which structured the reception of Marx’s value theory without being challenged: the misinterpretation, touched off by Engels, of the first three chapters of Capital as a value and money theory of what Engels called ‘simple commodity production.’”77 Backhaus assumes that “proceeding from this fundamental error, Marxist value theory necessarily inhibited the reception of Marx’s value theory.”78 If therefore at this level an initial distinction is made between a Marxist theory and Marx’s theory, a problematization of Marx’s meta-theoretical self-understanding also occurs early on. Louis Althusser had already affirmed, with the aid of a “symptomatic” reading directed against a subject-centric intentionalist hermeneutic, that Marx’s work represents a scientific revolution in the theoretical praxis of the analysis of capitalism, which at the meta-theoretical level is superimposed upon by a discourse inadequate to this problematic. Althusser defines the tasks of a reconstruction as the removal of the inadequate meta-discourse and the transformation of its dominant metaphors, which he reads as symptoms for the absence of an adequate self-reflection of the real procedure of the analysis of capital, into concepts.79 As distinct from Althusser and his dualist conception of the relationship between the real object and the object of knowledge80, this issue is usually formulated in the reconstruction debate within the theoretical framework of a Marxian critique of ideology: Marx distinguishes between “esoteric” and “exoteric” levels in the works of classical political economy. If the former contains insights into the social context of mediation of the bourgeois mode of production, the latter is content with an unmediated description and systematization of the objective forms of thought of the everyday consciousness of social actors, remaining trapped in the reified illusion of the immediacy of phenomena which are in fact socially mediated. So the “exoteric” argumentation cannot be traced back psychologically to subjective deficiencies or even conscious attempts at deception on the part of theorists. It results from a determinate form of thought which is the systematic and initially involuntary product of the forms of social intercourse of the capitalist mode of production. The reconstruction debate would now apply the esoteric/exoteric distinction to Marx’s work itself.

Ultimately, even in the critique of political economy and in historical materialism – that is to say in the theoretical praxis regarded at the previous stage of reconstruction as an intact “esoteric” layer – “exoteric” content and conceptual ambivalence “between scientific revolution and classical tradition”81 are manifest. The doctrine of the inviolability of the presentation of the critique of political economy in Capital is finally discarded. In place of the legend of a linear progression of knowledge on Marx’s part, there appeared the recognition of a complex coexistence and interpenetration of progress and regression in the method of presentation and the state of research of Marx’s critique of economy. Ultimately, the increased popularization of the presentation of the analysis of the forms of value from the Grundrisse to the second edition of Capital was pointed out. This popularization, to the extent that it increasingly concealed the form-genetic method, offered points of reference to historicist and substantialist readings.82

IV. Learning Processes within Marxism

Since there is not enough space within the framework of this text to elucidate even approximately the aspects of a scientific revolution – internal learning processes, but also regressions to traditional economic and historical-philosophical positions in Marx’s work – I will attempt to briefly mention some of the points arrived at in the above-mentioned learning processes within Marxism.

Marx’s theory does not affirm some kind of automatic liberation; rather, it should be understood as the theoretical instance of a body of work, mediated by analysis and critique, contributing to the liberation from the automatism of an irrational mode of socialization. Marx’s assertion that he grasps the development of the capitalist mode of production as “a process of natural history,”83 often cited by both Marxists and anti-Marxists as proof either of the highest scientific status of Marx’s work or of unscientific prophecy, should be understood as a critical statement. “Nature” or “naturalness” are negatively determined categories for a social system that, on the basis of its constitution by the private division of labor, asserts itself with regard to social actors as a relentless machine using up abstract labor, as a “destiny of value” beyond all collective and individual control and yet reproducing itself by means of their activity.

Marx’s theory is “a unified critical judgment on previous history, to the effect that men have allowed themselves to be degraded into objects of the blind and mechanical process of its economic development.”84 While Marx does succumb to a historical optimism that often tips over into a philosophy of history in the declamatory sections of his works, this is fundamentally contradicted by his scientific critique of philosophies of history and political economy.85 But it is precisely from these cliches that the Marxism of the Second and Third Internationals, as well as the more educated among those who disdain Marx, paste together an abstruse system of iron historical necessities, up to and including a “law of the sequence of social formations” which establishes the “general historically necessary tendency of the progress of the human species.”86

The critique of political economy, which in the form of Marx’s late works “does not withstand comparison with the immanent claim of the programmatic declaration in TheGerman Ideology,”87 namely of presenting the capitalist mode of production in its totality, can be presented as a process of four critiques: 1) the critique of bourgeois society and its destructive “natural” forms of development, against the background of the real, objective possibility it generates of its own emancipatory transcendence, 2) the critique of the fetishized and backward everyday consciousness of social actors systematically generated by these social relations, 3) the critique of the entire theoretical field of political economy88, which uncritically systematizes these common perceptions, and 4) the critique of utopian social criticism, which either confronts the system of the capitalist mode of production with a model of social liberation, or presumes to bring isolated economic forms to bear against the system as a whole by means of reforms.89 The critique is therefore not immanent in the sense that it would affirm the determinations of exchange, bourgeois ideals, proletarian demands for rights, or industrial production (which is subsumed to capital) against capitalism as a whole.

The method of the critique of economy can be described as the “development” or “analysis of forms.” It aims to grasp the specific sociality of historically distinct modes of production. Whereas “bourgeois” approaches conduct at best a science of the reproduction of society withinspecific economic and political forms, a critique of political economy must be conceived of as a science of these forms.90 Political economy operates at the level of already constituted economic objects, takes them empirically as a given, or can only justify their existence in a circular manner, without conceptually penetrating the systematic process of their constitution. It succumbs to the self-mystification of the capitalist world of objects as a world of natural forms91, thus depriving humans of the ability to configure and alter their fundamental structures.

In contrast, form-analysis develops these forms (such as value, money, capital, but also law and the state) from the contradictory conditions of the social constitution of labor, “clarifies them, grasps their essence and necessity.”92 Form development is not to be understood as the retracing of the historical development of the object, but rather the conceptual deciphering of the immanent structural relationships of the capitalist mode of production. It unscrambles the apparently independent, apparently objectively grounded forms of social wealth and the political compulsion of the capitalist mode of production as historically specific and therefore – albeit in no way arbitrarily or in a piecemeal manner – as changeable forms of praxis.

Traditional as well as Western Marxism had completely ignored the revolutionary scientific potential of Marx’s approach, his theory of the monetary constitution of value. Above all, the neue Marx-Lektüre criticizedthe empiricist-historicist misinterpretation of the method of presentation that started with Engels, and the “premonetary” interpretation of the theory of value in Capital, but also ambivalences in Marx’s work itself and the popularization of his method, which meant “forgoing a systematic elaboration of fundamental ideas of value theory and methodology.”93Engels and Traditional Marxism interpreted different levels of abstraction of the presentation of the laws of the capitalist mode of production in Capitalas empirically coequal levels of a model of historically distinct modes of production. Thus categories such as abstract labor, value, and the elementary form of value were reinterpreted in an empiricist way, and the connection between commodity, money, and capital – considered essential by Marx – was transformed into a coincidence. Marxism thus operated on a methodological and value-theoretical terrain that Marx had criticized with regard to classical economics. However, Marx’s critique of political economy is distinct from an alternative political economy in primarily two respects: in the first instance it is not the theory of surplus-value, but rather the form theory of labor that distinguishes Marx from classical political economy. Marx criticizes the way political economy unreflectively presupposes the form of “value,” never questioning its genesis, unable to grasp labor that takes the form of value as a historically specific social form (the question is not raised as to “why labour is represented by the value of its product”94). Political economy therefore operates fundamentally within the field of fetishistic forms. Moreover, Marx criticizes the premonetary character of its value theory, since it “treat[s] the form of value as a thing of no importance, as having no connection with the inherent nature of commodities,”95meaning it does not distinguish between intrinsic and external measure of value as categories existing at two different levels of theoretical abstraction, and does not grasp the necessity of the money-form for the exchange of commodities. Money is understood as a purely technical instrument which for reasons of convenience takes the place of exchange on the basis of calculations of labor-time magnitudes. In Marx’s work, on the other hand, money is developed as a necessary moment in the process of commodity exchange. Without a general form of value, commodities cannot represent value for each other, and would be reduced to the status of products. One must therefore proceed from the “equiprimordial” constitution of abstract labor as a logically prior immanent measure of value, and money as the external measure of value. In this sense, Marx speaks of the substance of value as a result obtained in exchange which furthermore first acquires an intertemporal existence as capital. In contrast to the empiricism and ahistoricism of political economy, Marx’s approach thus reveals itself to be a perception of essence in the sense of the reconstruction of a structure and system of agency which is empirically not immediately perceivable – by means of the elaboration of a non-empirical theoretical level which first makes possible the explanation of empirical forms of appearance, such as money. Marx follows “a principle of the development of economic categories by distinguishing between different levels of abstraction.”96 Categories such as abstract labor or value therefore have no immediate empirical referents. The sequence of the categories of commodity and money is not to be understood as a historical sequence of independently existing circumstances, but rather as a conceptual analysis.

Claim: Doctrine of the materialist conception of history as the center of the collaborative works of Marx and EngelsEngels: Anti-Dühring, Ludwig Feuerbach, “Review of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy“ (1859) etc.Marx: Capital Vol. 1 – Chapter 32, “Preface” to Critique (1859), Manifesto (M/E)

Closed, coherent proletarian worldview and doctrine of the evolution of nature and history (“becoming and passing away”)

Claim: apprehending the whole Marx, or later works as interpretative framework for the early worksMarx: Grundrisse, Capital Vol. I first edition, Urtext, “Results of the Immediate Process of Production”

Deciphering and Critique of the Forms of capitalist socialization by means of logical-systematic method of presentations (“form-development and critique”)

Above all in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, stylized by Marxism-Leninism as the classical textbook of dialectical materialism alongside Anti-Dühring. Here, Marxism becomes an ideology in the strict Marxian sense: a systemization of the forms of thought of a reified common sense. Concerning the political-pragamatical background of the text, usually disregarded in ML, see Johannes Busch-Weßlau, Der Marxismus und die Legitimation politischer Macht (Frankfurt: Campus Verl, 1990), 30.

Falko Schmieder points to the a priori role of the medium of photography as a foundation of this naive realism in philosophy, as well as the fundamental commonalities between Engels, Lenin, and Feuerbach; Ludwig Feuerbach und der Eingang der klassischen Fotografie. Zum Verhältnis von anthropologischem und Historischem Materialismus (Berlin: PHILO-Verlag, 2004), 213.

Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe point out the Darwinist-Hegelian character of this conception: “Darwinism alone does not offer ‘guarantees for the future,’ since natural selection does not operate in a direction predetermined from the beginning. Only if a Hegelian type of teleology is added to Darwinism – which is totally incompatible with it – can an evolutionary process be presented as a guarantee of future transitions”; Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (New York: Verso, 2001), 20.

Kautsky, quoted in Steinberg, Sozialismus und deutsche Sozialdemokratie, 61. See also Ethics and the Materialist Conception Of History. According to Kautsky, the prospects for freedom and humanity are not “mere expectations of conditions which only ought to come, which we simply wish and will, but outlooks at conditions which must come, which are necessary.” Kautsky defends himself against interpretations of necessity “in the fatalist sense, that a higher power will present them to us of itself,” but assumes an irresistible immanent historical-economic compulsion toward revolution, whereby the immanent compulsive laws of capitalism and the formation of the proletariat as a successful revolutionary subject play the same role: “unavoidable in the sense, that the […] capitalists in their desire for profit [!] revolutionize the whole economic life, as it is also inevitable that the workers aim for shorter hours of labor and higher wages, that they organize themselves, that they fight the capitalist class and its state, as it is inevitable that they aim for the conquest of political power and the overthrow of capitalist rule. Socialism is inevitable because the class struggle and the victory of the proletariat is inevitable.”

On the paradoxes of this combination of voluntarism and determinism, see Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

It is precisely Western Marxism that – against Marxism-Leninism – emphasizes the non-ontological character of Marx’s materialism; see Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory” in Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum, 1972), as well as Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of Nature in Marx (New York: Verso, 2014). Stalin determines the components of Marx’s theory as follows: Dialectic: a universal logic of development emphasizing discontinuity, which teaches that everything can be conceived of as in a state of becoming and decaying; Materialism: a contemplative ontology which teaches that consciousness is merely a reflection of a nature existing independent and outside of consciousness; Historical Materialism: the application of dialectical materialism to history; universal historical laws are class struggle, the dialectic between forces of production and relations of production, rooted in the primacy of the development of the forces of production (casua sui concept of forces of production), and ultimately the law of progress of successive social formations.

“This makes clear, of course, why in the beginning of his first book Marx proceeds from the simple production of commodities as the historical premise, ultimately to arrive from this basis to capital – why he proceeds from the simple commodity instead of a logically and historically secondary form – from an already capitalistically modified commodity.” Engels, “Preface” in Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 3.

That is to say, the law of value discussed by Marx. See Engels’ “Supplement” to volume 3.

Ibid

Ibid.

“Or is it believed that the peasant and the artisan were so stupid as to give up the product of 10 hours’ labor of one person for that of a single hours’ labor of another?”; and whoever does so learns “only through mistakes.” Ibid.

For Marx’s view, see for example: “Adam Smith constantly confuses the determination of the value of commodities by the labour-time contained in them with the determination of their value by the value of labour; he is often inconsistent in the details of his exposition and he mistakes the objective equalisation of unequal quantities of labour forcibly brought about by the social process for the subjective equality of the labours of individuals”; A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

According to Marxism-Leninism, “value functions as an instrument of the planned administration of the socialist processes of production and reproduction, according to the principles of bookkeeping and control of the mass of labor and of consumption. Correspondingly, the relation of value is consciously implemented”; Wolfgang Peter Eichhorn, “Wert” in G. Klaus and M. Buhr, ed. Philosophisches Wörterbuch, Bd. 2 (West Berlin: DEB, 1985), 1291. Within this framework, socialism consists “merely in the revolutionized way of calculating the same social determination of the products of human labor as exists in the capitalist commodity economy,” as Stefan Grigat critically notes; “Kritik und Utopie,” Weg und Ziel, 4 (1997): 20. Thus, allegedly Marxian communism degenerates into a sort of Proudhonian system of labor notes, as Diethard Behrens and Kornelia Hafner also observe: “all hitherto existing conceptions of the transition to socialism resort to models of immediate calculation of labor-value and utility”; “Auf der Suche nach dem wahren Sozialismus. Von der Kritik des Proudhonismus über die russische Modernisierungsdiktatur zum realsozialistischen Etikettenschwindel” in Anton Pannekoek, Marxistischer Antileninismus (Freiburg, 1991), 226. See here also Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert. Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition (Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 1999), 385-392; and Kittsteiner, “Bewusstseinsbildung.”

Compare Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism: “why is the apparatus of state coercion created not as a private apparatus of the ruling class, but distinct from the latter in the form of an impersonal apparatus of public power distinct from society?”

Engels, “Barbarism and Civilization” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. No wonder, then, that Lenin refers affirmatively to this “explanation,” with its theory of agents and influence.

Engels, Anti-Dühring. [Translator’s Note: The official translation of “ideeller Gesamtkapitalist” in the Marx-Engels Collected Works renders this unsatisfactorily as “the ideal personification of the total national capital,” when in fact “ideal total capitalist” is more accurate.]

The term was probably first used in a Leninist polemic against Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness (see Rudolf Walther, “Marxismus” in O. Brunner, ed., Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Bd. 3, [Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1982], 968), but did not achieve greater significance, neither as a polemical formulation nor as a self-description by the theorists commonly subsumed under the name (such as Lukács, Korsch, Bloch, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Lefebvre, etc.). Here, I follow Perry Anderson’s usage of the term in Considerations on Western Marxism(New York: Verso, 1987). As fruitful as the concept of Western Marxism might be as a heuristic model, its limits must be clearly shown; see the critique of Anderson by Wolfgang Fritz Haug, “Westlicher Marxismus?” in Pluraler Marxismus, Bd. 2 (Hamburg: Argument, 1987) and Michael Krätke, “Marxismus als Sozialwissenschaft” in Haug, Materialien zum Historisch-kritischen Wörterbuch des Marxismus (Hamburg: Argument, 1996), 77.

A scientific psychology cannot be found in the thought of most representatives of Marxism, apart from positive references to Pavlov’s behaviorism. Psychoanalysis was mostly rejected, if not demonized as “bourgeois-decadent”. Helmut Dahmer offers a critical overview of such reactions in Libido und Gesellschaft. Studien über Freud und die Freudsche Linke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 241-277; within the framework of Western Marxism, it was primarily Lukács who distinguished himself in the condemnation of Freud. Gramsci by his own admission “was not able to study Freud’s theories”

As further characteristics of Western Marxism, Anderson names the recourse to pre-Marxian philosophy in order to clarify the method of a critical social theory; the incorporation of contemporary “bourgeois” theories: an esoteric writing style; a rather pessimistic appraisal of historical development markedly divergent from the triumphalist diction of classical Marxism and Marxism-Leninism; a preference for problems of aesthetics.

The first attempts at a new reading of Marx already occurred in the 1920s, on the part of the Soviet authors Isaak Illich Rubin and Evgeny Pashukanis. See I.I. Rubin, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, and Evgeny Pashukanis, The General Theory of Law and Marxism. Their awareness of problems of aspects of Marx’s theory with regard to value and legal theory was not even matched in a rudimentary way for a long time, in the East or the West. Only with the debates since the end of the 1960s did this change somewhat.

The “critical Marxism” of the Sixties, of which Alfred Schmidt was the primary advocate, emphasizes the negative and historically limited character and claim to validity of a “materialism of second nature,” but tends to regard methodological individualism as an adequate description of coming communist relations. The “scientific” Marxism of the Althusser school emphasizes, against individualistic theories of a “constituting subject,” that actors are merely bearers of the relations of productions, but on the basis of the tendency of its categories to assume universal-historical character (Balibar’s combinatorics of levels, Althusser’s concepts of praxis and ideology), elevates the independence of relations of production to a scientific norm).

See Althusser and Balibar, Reading Capital. The difference between the structuralist and the critical-reconstructive reading is not limited to this point. Whereas the former attempts to unmask Hegelianism as an inedaquate meta-discourse, for the latter, reference to Hegel on questions of methodology is often regarded as the royal road to understanding Marx’s work.

This is the subtitle of Heinrich’s book, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: see Backhaus’ critique of his own theoretical premises in the first two parts of his Materialien (Backhaus, Dialektik der Wertform, 132n).

For a critical perspective on some aspects of these theses, see Dieter Wolf, Ware und Geld. Der dialektische Widerspruch im Kapital(Hamburg: VSA, 1958) (republished in 2002 under the title Der dialektische Widerspruch im Kapital). Wolf also criticizes tendencies within the neue Marx-Lektüre that identify Marx’s dialectical method with logical contradictions, thus lending Marx and his method a patina of irrationalism; see his critique of Colletti and Göhler. Irrationalist positions are also found today by representatives of the Krisis and Exit groups and the Initiative Sozialistisches Forum Freiburg.